In this stressful time, your world like mine probably feels unmoored. Anxieties have mushroomed, filled with a thousand concerns I couldn’t have unimagined a few months ago. At the same time my world has shrunk, reduced to the physical parameters of my house, garden, and neighborhood, and to the imaginative confines of my new novel manuscript and to my reading. More than ever, I find myself returning to favorite books and authors, my fiction to shelter by.
We probably all have a list of go-to authors for “comfort reading,” though like childhood blankies and quarts of Jamoca Almond Fudge, we don’t often need it. Here’s mine. Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, and Penelope Fitzgerald. P. G. Wodehouse. Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey. What they have in common is pretty obvious. All are British (or Commonwealth, in New Zealander Marsh’s case) writers of the previous century. But what appeals most to me in their work is a wry, often gray-to-black humor.
Wodehouse’s comic stories are legendary, of course. They’re pure humor, written with such a blithe hand that they pull you into the nonsense with affectionate delight. Although Wodehouse wrote during eras of deep global trauma—world wars, economic collapse, a catastrophic pandemic—he offered his readers complete refuge from those real-world fears. His stories are like fond tickles, reminding us we’re wired to smile and laugh too.
A more subtle and even subversive humor defines my list of contemporary go-to fiction writers. At the top of my list are the novels of Kate Atkinson, with her fabulous wry voice. I love George Saunders’s short stories and Cathleen Schine’s novels for the same reasons. It’s the eternal human comedy: what makes us ridiculous makes us more lovable, not less.
I aimed for at least a touch of such humane humor in Relative Fortunes and Passing Fancies. The two new novels I’m revising (another historical mystery and a more contemporary novel of suspense) are more laced with dark comedy, even as they delve into the serious, life-rattling consequences of disaster and crime.
To keep my hand and thoughts steady in these unnerving times, I end each day back in a book. Jeeves never fails to suggest something suitable.
Images: P. G. Wodehouse, circa 1930, and his novel My Man Jeeves, 1920 edition
